The Hands That Feed A Nation Are Barefoot

Asem Mustafa Awan

There is something almost painfully simple about this photograph: two farmers, two tools, bare feet and a field waiting to be planted.

No tractor is visible. No modern machinery is at work. Just two men pulling and turning the soil by hand, row after row, under a sun that offers no concession to the people who work beneath it.

For them, farming is not a profession chosen for romance. It is survival.

The soil must be prepared because a crop must grow. The crop must grow because a family must eat. Whatever remains after feeding the household will have to be sold, often to settle debts accumulated before the harvest has even begun.

This is the uncomfortable reality behind the image of an agrarian Pakistan.

Agriculture remains central to the country's economy and employs about 37 percent of its labour force, yet the people working the land often remain among its most vulnerable.

The official economic survey itself acknowledges the pressure. Fertilizer offtake fell 14.1 percent in FY2025, with high prices and subdued crop prices cited among the reasons. Certified seed availability met only 35.6 percent of national requirements.

For a farmer, these are not numbers on a government table. They are decisions made in the field: whether to buy fertilizer or save money for food, whether to hire machinery or use one's own back, whether another season of borrowing is worth the risk.

The irony is difficult to ignore. A country that depends so heavily on agriculture still leaves many of its farmers struggling to afford the means to cultivate the land.

Pakistan has also had to rely on imports for important food requirements. Edible oil is a particularly stark example: official figures put local edible-oil production at only around 0.55 million tonnes for 2025-26, leaving a substantial gap to be met through imports.

Meanwhile, the World Bank estimates that around 45 percent of Pakistan's population lived below the $4.20-a-day international poverty threshold in FY2025.

Somewhere inside that statistic are men like these.

They do not ask for luxury. They ask for a crop that survives, a price that covers its cost and enough left over to take something home.

Their hands are doing work that machines could complete in a fraction of the time. But until machinery, affordable inputs, reliable markets and meaningful support reach the farmer, these hands will continue to carry a burden far heavier than the tools they hold.

A nation cannot call itself secure while the people who grow its food remain insecure.

And perhaps the most powerful message in this photograph is also the simplest: the hands that feed us are still working barefoot.

Photo Credit APP